


five times in which awe finds viktor nikiforov

by Waypaststrange (moonbeatblues)



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, like the nether, soft, to which I can return once this is in public
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-12
Updated: 2017-04-12
Packaged: 2018-10-18 00:17:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10605318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonbeatblues/pseuds/Waypaststrange
Summary: in which Yuuri Katsuki proves himself a strange bird, and in which Viktor Nikiforov rediscovers warmth.





	

**Author's Note:**

> guess who's still alive  
> hoping to finish this somewhat succinctly, desperate to break radio silence

i.

Things are growing numb, colder and colder, like the slow sting of ice seeping past your gloves, semantic and sequined.  
Not a sensation you’re used to anymore- falling, that is- but familiar all the same.  
You know you’re not what you once were. You miss your long hair, you miss the elation of your first gold, you miss the days when you were surprising, a fresh whirl of silver across the ice.

 

You long quietly for the days when you were new.

 

Yakov can see it; you can tell when his scowls start to soften. Makkachin sees it, too, you know, when you start to haunt your own apartment. Your medals gather dust, and he curls up silently at the foot of your bed in the mornings you spend listlessly watching the St. Petersburg sunrise slide lines of pale light across your room.  
But your fever-pitch fans are unyielding, and it digs you deeper to realize just how little they ever knew you.  
-

This Grand Prix is almost unbearable. You feel fuzzy and distant, a grey buzz settling in your bones and in the back of your head. Yakov’s new student follows at his heels, a growling little kitten of a boy, and it amuses you to see him ruffled and baring his pearly little teeth at the cameras, but only for a little while. 

 

You skate and it is nothing. You grin and throw your arms around Yakov at the kiss-and-cry, and you are so hollow it frightens you.

 

You go to the banquet with every intention of getting drunk enough to neutralize the fog curling around inside of you, but they only serve champagne and you’ve been beaten to the punch.  
It’s the baby-faced skater from Japan, the most spectacular crash-and-burn you've ever seen on ice, and he is adorably shitfaced.

 

Thoughts of following in his footsteps forgotten, you watch with what can really only be described as gleeful horror as he challenges Yuri to a dance-off, and Yakov’s glowering kitten with a decade of ballet under his belt is solidly trounced.

 

Where was this? you wonder. This is not the same creature as earlier.  
No, whatever's been coaxed out of Yuuri Katsuki by champagne and emotional overload is sure of every movement- never a misstep, not a beat of hesitation. It's mesmerizing.  
And then he is reaching for you and your laughter sticks in your throat, but only for a moment.

You take his hand.

 

Yuuri Katsuki is warm, loose-limbed and flushing as he pulls you forward. His hand finds your waist, furnace-fingers curling over your hip like a brand, and fuck- he can tango.  
(So can you, thank god.)

And oh, boy.  
Katsuki and his goddamned hips are going to be the death of you.  
You can't fathom how this is the same person as this morning, how someone so seemingly magnetized to the ice earlier can come so loose and alive, fucking sashaying right in front of you with dark, narrowed eyes.  
You feel shot full of warmth, like honey flooding your hollow bones, and, still transfixed, it takes you a moment.  
Warm.  
You feel warm. 

You almost falter with the realization, but you're well-accustomed to reflexive adjustments.  
You catch, like an internal pick, and let him spin you so your shoulders press, clasped hands out in front of you, long fingers and loose wrists. His chest flush against your back, right arm around you, breath warm and champagne-sweet behind your ear, and he's far too infectious to keep a grin off your face.  
It's not like you're trying, though.

And then.  
Whirling.  
Somewhere, this ceased to be a tango without your notice, the soft music spilling from ceiling speakers too delicate for it.

No one has dared enter your clearing, broken the wide berth given to your bodies. You're aware you're a spectacle, this event never one for dancing despite the venue, but you're known by now for public displays, for the unexpected, the quasi-illegal. You had slowly begun to hate the special treatment, the way everyone would let you skirt around rules because you could land a quad flip. It had only expedited the numbness, the slow removal of your emotion from the sport.  
It was a vicious cycle of trying to feel, being observed but politely ignored, and further losing feeling, growing secretly desperate for something.  
For someone to know you.

This, though, is different. 

You're a spectacle, but it's not just your spectacle.  
The unfeeling, uncaring champion with silver hair, and the skater self-put to shame, his shell of loss and anxiety broken by alcohol.  
Both of you the the magnets, the cruces of public attention, of opinions shielded from your faces but whispered behind television screens; together in a tangle of limbs, you are something more than the sum of your parts.

The two of you are beautiful.

 

He dips you, hand insistent but reliable on your thigh, the other tilting your face toward his, and you, faintly grasping at the back of his shirt, the both of you grinning. Fond eyes, the sweet heaviness of champagne between you- you are still so blissfully, inexplicably warm.

 

And later, sidling up, half to you, half on you, beseeching and besotted, begging for you to be his coach, you cannot refuse. Not when he calls you Vitya, the endearment lilting on his accented tongue.  
'Okay,' you whisper, feeling the most vulnerable you have all night, and you can still feel the warmth in your veins when you wake with the Sochi sun.  
-

ii.

Radio silence really does wonders for your psyche, you think, blank and curled up in the shower of your flat.

But then, what were you expecting? A letter?  
Neither of you have the other's number, a profound mistake on your part. And what- are you to ask Yakov where he's gone, ask him to call Celestino, supposed to tell your grumping gargoyle of a coach that you plan to fuck off to Japan or Detroit or wherever to cut your career at its peak and coach last year's spectacular failure because you'd danced with him?

 

He lingers on the suit jacket you'd worn that night, and you don't have the heart to have it dry-cleaned.

You accept it, slowly, silently. You allow the numbness to return, because you cannot cast your every desperate hope on a shamed Japanese skater who has no way to contact you.  
Right?

 

-  
You consider retiring, a few times.  
You can tell you've only got a few years before the occasional ache in your bones begins to persist.  
But no, Yakov will drag two, maybe three more years out of you, and leave you drained, just the way you'd thought you wanted when your hair was long. You never thought callow led to callous so quickly.  
-

 

And then, one morning, Chris sends you a link.

Conversations with Chris are always helium-light, flirtatious in the way a cat flirts with a feather, so you're not expecting much. Just a link, no suffixing quip. 

 

It's Yuuri. 

You almost drop your phone on Makkachin.

 

And oh, he's adorable.

Softer from a few months of lethargy, you can tell, but it suits him. His eyes are that same soft shade from the banquet, and your heart judders, skips like a record scratch. And-

Oh.

It's your free skate.

It's him, it's Yuuri Katsuki, skates cutting your lines across foreign ice, tracing trails so familiar they're etched in your subconscious.  
He's skating to you, he's skating for you, and hope lodges, lofty and traitorous, in your throat.  
And no, he's not perfect.  
But there is something in the way he moves that you could never attain with this program, some life behind his eyes, some spark in his step that had been dying inside of you that whole season.  
You can tell he hadn't been skating with music, movements just out of sync with the edited-in track, but it works, his slightly slower movements contrastingly calm against the frenetic strain that creeps into Stammi Vicino near the end.  
Where you had relished the rush to the end, to the finishing, frantic swell of sound, he seems almost sad to let it go.

With the look in his eyes and that same silent something in his veins as the bombast cuts off, he is radiant.

 

'Be my coach, Viktor.' 

He remembers you.  
He still wants you.

Your mouth tastes like pennies (you'd bitten your lip) and champagne. You're five seconds from sprinting to pack your bags.

Your phone buzzes as the video ends and as a sleepy Makkachin snuffles against your stomach, too aware of your charged skin.

From Chris: "Go get your boy ;)"

 

iii.

Sober Yuuri Katsuki is skittish and shy, and unfairly cute.

You think he's afraid of you.

 

Okay, so maybe you could have worked on your entrance a little. He had the right to be flustered in the onsen (boy, was he), but his seeming urge to give you at least a five-foot radius persists, to your great dismay.

It soon becomes apparent that getting this Yuuri to open up to you will take time, time and kid gloves, but that's okay.  
You are patient, much more so than you let on. 

Flowers are not to be peeled open, and you know in your bones that Yuuri is going to burst into bloom.

In time.  
-

Trust seeps slow, like raw honey.  
Much as you want to be the one to smooth out the tension in Yuuri's spine, you wait. His shoulders loose and come down like old walls, the edge of fear and shock behind his eyes blunts and softens, and your spirits are borne away, like kites snagged by the sea breeze.  
He starts to lose the fat around his middle, which you see depart somewhat wistfully (really, Yuuri is quite adorable). Some mornings, you see him stretching in the kitchen, using the counter as an improvised barre, and are astonished by just how flexible he is, swinging one leg up to hover over his head in a perfect vertical split through a groggy yawn, as though he were fourteen and not twenty-four.  
Your toes curl against the cool floor as Yuuri obliviously arches his back.  
-

Yakov's kitten doesn't worry you, but boy, does he frighten Yuuri.

 

Your Japanese is sparse at best, so most of Yuuri’s words when he speaks, low and rapidfire to Mari when she stops by one night, are lost to you.  
From his tone, though, you can glean the gist.  
Fear, sorrow. Desperation.  
Things you can’t stand to instill in Yuuri, things you know he’s far too accustomed to. 

It makes you want to take Yurio by the collar and fling him into the Pacific.  
How dare he abandon Yakov and come scrambling down to Japan after you on a half-promise--

The irony of the situation sets in sickeningly, then, and you are suddenly doused and angry with yourself instead.  
You had promised Yurio, and whether Yuuri´s confidence be shaken or still, you owe the boy a short program. 

Yuuri doesn’t deserve the repercussions of your shortcomings, nor is it fair whatsoever to pretend you have any intention of leaving him.  
But you keep up the pretense, because Yuuri may be a flower, but he cannot be an orchid. He needs to test his spindly wings against a real storm, and Plisetsky is nothing if not a (sacrilegious) whirling dervish.  
You give him Eros, out of intrigue and a selfish little part of you that clings to the notion of Yuuri seducing you.

 

And then you think that perhaps you've been too impatient, that perhaps the slow seep of trust is less slow and more imperceptible, that this Yuuri truly is not the one from before.

Because he struggles, inevitably, with eros. Of course he does, that's not the surprising part.  
He struggles with eros, and when you ask him to find something to embody seduction, he chooses katsudon.

 

You break open a little at that, right in the ribs.  
You'd never talked- Yuuri had never wanted to talk about the banquet. He seemed utterly content to ignore it, so truly that it really did seem like it never happened- as though it was you that had been rendered so incoherent and fevered that night to imagine.  
And it almost convinced you, once or twice, that it had just been you. That this Yuuri, tangible and stuttering and soft and wanting absolutely nothing to do with a stripper pole, had been the one to let the ice send his feet out from under him, that you were the sole victim of some cruel strain of Mandela Effect.  
But there are pictures on your phone (courtesy of Yuri and Chris) and you are far too good at drinking for fabrication. 

But if Yuuri, this Yuuri, tangible and stuttering and soft, the Yuuri you promised to train, the Yuuri you will not allow yourself to fail, your Yuuri, doesn't want to acknowledge it, you will respect his wishes.

And you do.  
You meet Yuuri where he is, katsudon-seduction and all.  
And it is alright.  
-

He finds it, somewhere.

Yuuri finds his Eros at the bottom of ceramic bowls and you are well and truly fucked.  
Because the way he glances over at you, a spinning, skintight glitter-storm victim in your old costume, sends something very familiar racing through waiting neurons, synapses synonymous.

And your dumb, gay ass made that short program for him to use all season.

 

And Yavok's kitten swoops and glides like an apathetic, adolescent bird, and you would love to see him with the last of his down shed in his shimmering wake, but he knows it, too.

Yuuri is an unwitting force of nature, and Plisetsky is gone before you can even announce it.

 

iii.5

And oh, Yuuri blooms.

But not before you break him, more than you'd meant, more, you think, than you can fix.  
-

God, you're the fucking worst.  
You let yourself say words you don't mean, words you told yourself you'd never say, not to Yuuri.

You tell him you'll leave, you lie to him again, and he breaks like a nitrogen rose on the cement.

 

You've only seen Yuuri cry once before, when he was post-practice exhausted, curled up with Makkachin on the floor and unaware you were hovering anxiously in the next room.  
Hiroko had told you about Vicchan (it was absolutely adorable, far too much ego fodder), so instead of rushing in and gathering up your poor student like so many porcelain shards, you'd waited.

This, though, is very different.

All Yuuri needed, all he ever fucking asked from you was to be in his corner, like a coach is supposed to do, and you couldn't even give him that.  
Maybe Yakov was right.

But no, you can't fall further. Yuuri, hands shaking and eyes red, needs you.

Silence proves a despot as you follow Yuuri to the rink. He won't look at you; frankly, you're afraid of what might happen if he did.

He touches you, briefly, just a soft pat right where your hair parts before he pushes away from the edge, and god, you're really the worst.  
You should be comforting him; never were you supposed to allow for vice-versa.

 

He unfurls from his starting position like some glittering insect, like a time-lapse lily, like a solar flare, and you are in orbit.

You're a little too entranced to be a proper coach; through your admittedly besotted haze, though, you still catch things, little imbalances, rotations over and under, the brief awkward catch of one skate on the ice before sweeping away in a controlled glide.  
But you cast these aside for now, to return to when the two of you are sharing the Hasetsu ice again, just twin tracks cutting across that silent, mirrored expanse, and no one else.  
Every instrument returns in that last great swell of sound, and you brace for that quad toe loop, often finicky, but you trust Yuuri. You can see it in his eyes, that silent, alluring fury he's far too content to shove deep down before and after competition. 

You and millions of people watch as Yuuri Katsuki, your aching and beloved aurora borealis, quadruple fucking flips.  
And he collides, rough and exhausted, the ice unforgiving, and though the music continues and he skates on and the stadium erupts around you in bullet-time bombast, there is perfect, brilliant silence. 

Kintsugi, you think, as he reaches out to you. Gold glitters in his eyes and under his skin, scarring over old fractures, weblike and wondrous.

And then he wilts, your weary Atlas, and you run.

 

You're familiar with the sensation of being watched. Years in the business of being made a spectacle, of making yourself a spectacle, have made you unflappable, but you can still feel it when you've flipped that switch, swallowed everyone's gaze with your gravity.

It's buzzing now, behind your left shoulder, as you run for the opening in the rink wall, the desperate scrape of Yuuri's skates toward you in your ears.

You can feel more than hear the questions hovering, unspoken, in the crowd.  
Yuuri is an unwitting master of ambiguity, and lazily scrolling through ice skating hashtags has proven that the public can't figure out what to make of him, of you, your public decorum, his vague ultimatums and skating themes and constant blushing.

'Did he-?'

'Love? As in-?'

'Are they-?'

There's a part of you that likes their uncertainty far too much. It's the same part that relishes the shiver down Yuuri's spine when you brace your cold fingers against his feverish skin, back in Hasetsu when he sits on the floor and lets you play with his hair.

But there's also a part of you that needs to know for yourself, and that is the part that keeps you barreling toward Yuuri, out of reach of regrets.

 

Yuuri is so delicate when you crash into him, frail and small and shaking from exhaustion, and more than ever, you want to keep him all to yourself.  
Yours- the word low and soft on your tongue- kept far, far away from mewling fans and soulless lenses; you want him out of reach of those ever-grabbing hands and only in reach of yours.  
Yuuri makes you feel selfish and white-hot and so fucking proud and he tastes like strawberry chapstick.

The ice is cold under your hands, bare and gloveless and bitter, but he is so, so warm and his smile sparks in your bones.

 

He crawls bashfully into your bed that night after sitting in the dark and stifling silence for five minutes or so, shifting under stiff hotel sheets and settling with his warm face in the side of your neck.  
You slide cold fingers up under his shirt. He shivers, half-asleep, and you think sleepily of home and Hasetsu, the two starting to muddle in your head.

iv.

(Permanence takes root with frightening speed.)

You'd cried on the plane back to Hasetsu. For Makkachin, of course: your dearest friend, closest confidant, who knows when you're at your worst, your coldest, sits sentry by your bed and nuzzles at your shaking hands.  
But for Yuuri, too. You'd watched his face crumple from the taxi window, watched your student, friend, lover(?) looking small and swallowed up by the hotel lobby, and had felt suspended in that single instant, like reaching the apex of a swing when you were young, hovering at that critical point until gravity called you home.

Makkachin is too sedative-addled to greet you when you landed, tail thumping sleepily against the tatami when you kneel over him, tears bleeding dark spots into his fur. You sleep on the floor with him that night, fingers knotted in brown curls, breathing in clinic residue and the fancy floral shampoo his hairdresser uses and dog and home.

You send Yuuri a picture of the two of you, Makkachin half-awake, tongue showing between loose jaws. It's late, far too late, but the read receipt immediately scrolls, as though he's been waiting for hours, and you frown.

You can feel him hesitating over miles and miles of winter-bare earth and cold, curling ocean. Yuuri always texts sparsely, even more taciturn than in person. Five minutes with your jet-lagged eyes fixed on the 'typing' message go by before he responds, and it's the first unorthodox bit of today that hasn't been upsetting.

-Good night, Viktor.

A pause.

-♡

You mash your face back into Makkachin's fur.  
-

The Fukuoka airport mires you in late-night lull, daytime music swapped for something faint and floating and classical as you hunch further into your coat and Makkachin snuffles at the linoleum. His paws are shaved in funny patches from his trip to the emergency room, like a French poodle, and his pride is still hurt from when you'd laughed at him.  
Minutes slow and coagulate into a shapeless mass, like cooling molasses. You feel listless, restless, helpless, and pull your knees up to your chest on the shitty fake leather of the airport seats like you used to when you were young and waiting for your scores to come in, sitting on your shaking hands.  
You read half a dozen pages of Anna Karenina and quit, Levin's desperate brand of self-deprecation striking much too close to home. You play sudoku for about twenty seconds before you accept that you're too addled for it. 

Makkachin's paws suddenly thump against the glass. He huffs more than barks, flattening his tongue to the window only to peel it off again, shuffling excitedly, and you look up.  
-

You don't think he can quite hear you with his face buried in your coat, but you don't much mind. You tell him, tired sending gravel down your throat, that you want to do more for him as a coach. You're not quite sure what to say, how you could possibly explain to your skittish student that he's becoming home to you.  
Instead, you let him say it, and it sounds like he's proposing. You tiredly tease his word choice, admittedly taken aback, and Yuuri blushes terribly, as he is wont to, but doesn't rescind his words.  
You hover a few inches off the floor.

“I wish you'd never retire.”  
It's your turn to muffle your words in his shoulder. He shakes, just a little, and tears bleed into your coat.  
Makkachin’s paws find purchase on your leg when Yuuri whispers to you about Grand Prix gold, like it's a certainty, and half-awake, warmer down to your toes than you've been in years, you can believe it is.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm over at seafleece.tumblr.com a lot these days, come say hello!


End file.
